Jay Furr's Dreamwidth Blog

We’ve had a game camera for a year and a half now and it’s been intermittently recording the back yard for about a year. I say “intermittently” because I turned it off this past December (or thereabouts) and only turned it back on again at the beginning of May. We got a nice video of a black bear roaming around our back yard a year ago, and any number of stills and short video clips of deer and rabbits, and once in a while, a bat. Not as many raccoons and so forth as you’d think.

We’ve got it set to take stills and short video clips when it detects motion. Once in a while we get nice stills and then the video clip records what happened just after the animal wandered out of shot. But then once in a while you get something like this:

This year’s batch had significantly more raccoons — one out of every three photos was a good sized raccoon, maybe the same one each time. We got a bobcat once, although blurrily, and we got a nice big black bear, although only on stills; by the time the video triggered the bear had stepped out of shot.

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Aside: I turned off the game camera one snowy day when I heard squealing out back and looked out to see a weasel of some sort killing a rabbit right there on the snow outside my window. I decided I didn’t want to capture any wintertime kills and turned off the game camera. I grant you that nature (red in tooth and claw) can happen any time, any date, but for some reason, I just didn’t have the heart to look at any more footage of my wintry back yard after that.